The Famished Road

Book 4 begins with Azaro’s sexual awakening. When he enters Madame Koto’s bar this time, he witnesses men and women dancing together provocatively, and he is drawn into the proceedings: “She drew me to her and my face pressed against her groin and an intoxicating smell staggered me like a new kind of dangerous wine” (272). As the scene continues, the suggestion is that Azaro ejaculates while dancing with the woman. This marks a new milestone in his coming-of-age story; his recently aroused desires indicate a new stage in his physical and psychological development.

However, sex is not merely about physical desire; it is another symbol—like money—of corruption. Obviously, sex is often conflated with moral corruption, but here it functions much as politics and money do: It obfuscates logical decision-making and ethical clarity. Flies begin to congregate at the scene, drawn to the decay and the decadence: “Flies did somersaults in my eyes,” Azaro thinks. “I become lost in the curious jungle of the crowd, lost in the midst of giants” (273). He is lost in the spiritual sense, as well as the physical sense. Later, when Madame Koto hands him a cup of palm wine, “[a] dead fly floated on its froth” (273). Again, flies are attracted to corruption, as in the putrefaction of organic matter, but the double entendre—corruption as moral dissolution—is intended.

Azaro starts to see the scene for what it hides:

Then the bar took on a sinister light. I saw its other sides, felt its secret moods. The men and women seemed like better versions of the spirits who used to come here, and who had tried to steal me away. [...] [U]nderneath all the dancing and the energy was the invasion of a rancid smell (273).

There is rot underneath the revelry. Yet Azaro is up to the task; his pilgrim’s progress-like journey continues with a new temptation to be conquered. He quietly “planned [his] escape” (275). Later, when he stumbles into the forest, he “realized that [he] was both lost and blind” (287). This is as the rainy season descends, and the world of mechanized progress—electricity, the road—is soundly defeated by the power of nature. It is also a metaphorical expression—“lost and blind”—for a seeker of spiritual (usually Christian) enlightenment.

Still, Azaro’s commitment to his ancestors’ ancient rituals and wild forests weighs equally in his thoughts. When he and Mum stumble across the “new church,” they hear singing that makes Azaro feel as if “any minute the world would end. The singing from the church made me afraid of life” (282). In contrast, he hears another group, deeper in the forest, also singing:

But this was different. The chanting was deeper, the dancing more virile, making the earth itself acknowledge the beating on its doors, and the singing was full of secrets and dread-making voices. They sounded like the celebration of an old pain, an ancient suffering that refused to leave (282).

There is still sorrow in the forest ritual—an expression of indigenous belief systems—but it is bursting with life in a way that the singing from the “new church” cannot claim.

Just as the forest rituals trump the church singing, so too does the weather and its counterpart, Mother Nature, conquer the attempts to modernize—or, one might suggest, raze—the countryside. As soon as the rainy season rushes in, “[t]he road became what it used to be, a stream of primeval mud, a river” (286). The sinkhole that opens up swallows the men working to connect the electricity. The trappings of “civilization” are no match for what the heavens can unleash. Azaro’s interactions with the “ancient mother,” who catches him as he falls and cares for him, clearly represent what is often dubbed Mother Nature: “She sat in her cobwebbed niche, a mighty statue in mahogany, powerful with the aroma of fertility. Her large breasts exuded a shameless libidinous potency” (290). In contrast to the shameful gyrations of the bar patrons, the “ancient mother” bears her sexual nature with grace and an appropriate sense of duty and care.

Finally, Azaro himself often operates as a liminal character, caught between worlds (the material and the spiritual), wandering “lost and blind” through the forest and into town, not quite belonging at home or the bar. When he sleepwalks his way to the “night roads,” he believes he has “walked through books and months and forgotten histories” (307). He is unmoored, unbound by time and space, symbolizing the newly independent nation itself. Book 4 ends with both a crashing return to reality and a hopeful, if uncertain, nod to the future: “Then all I was left with was a world drowning in poverty, a mother-of-pearl moon, and the long darkness before dawn” (308). There is a faint light on the horizon in that hint of dawn—itself a liminal time wherein the unexpected can often occur.